Mayoral candidate wants life coaches for Muni drivers

At long last, one of San Francisco’s 11 serious — and seriously nap-inducing — candidates for mayor has had an eyebrow-raising week.

If you call grabbing international attention for what’s believed to be the first political ad to feature the child of an openly gay candidate anywhere eye-brow raising. Oh, and proposing life coaches for Muni drivers at The Chronicle editorial board. And discussing wrapping the inside of the 14-Mission bus line to look like a Virgin America airplane.

Thank you, former Supervisor Bevan Dufty. We appreciate any zaniness to break up the coverage of various candidates’ 17-point job plans. This is, after all, San Francisco people.

Dufty started the week by unveiling an ad in which he’s shown riding Muni with his 5-year-old daughter, Sidney, who thinks the oft-derided bus system is magical. Dufty said he wants everybody to see it that way.

The ad drew the attention of MSNBC, On Top Magazine, Daily Kos, the Huffington Post and even London’s Daily Mail. British readers learned that Dufty, who represented the Castro on the board, and his lesbian friend conceived Sidney and that some view Dufty as exploiting his daughter for using her in an ad.

Dufty said Sidney’s a lot like him and loves the attention.

“She’s very much a performer and a public person,” Dufty said. “The only occupational hazard is that Sidney continues to be afraid of drag queens.”

Next up came Dufty’s appearance Tuesday at the Chronicle’s editorial board. These candidate sessions can feel very repetitive, but Dufty stood out. It seemed everybody left the room muttering, “Life coaches?”

Yes, Dufty is very serious about hiring life coaches to work with Muni drivers, street sweepers and other frontline city employees. He’s convinced that Muni drivers’ high no-show rate, for example, would drop significantly if the drivers were happy in life and at work.

“I want them to step into their greatness,” Dufty said. “I want them to be the most memorable bus driver a person has ever experienced.”

Dufty’s got plenty more where that came from.

He wants to get Virgin America to wrap the inside of the 14-Mission line to look like one of its planes — complete with atmospheric music and red and purple lighting. (“You look so much better on their planes than you do under the harsh light of Muni,” he said. “I think that would be super fun.”)

He wants to create a Happy Dog Program in partnership with the tenants’ union and apartment association. He hopes that if dog owners can prove they’ve registered their dogs, have dog walkers take them out when they’re at work and have taken classes on dog ownership, more landlords will accept tenants with pups.

He wants artists-in-residence in public housing complexes to inspire tenants, to have local universities sponsor the most infamous public housing projects and offer classes there, and to bring in outside do-gooders to, say, plant community gardens or lead classes in gospel aerobics. (We’d never heard of gospel aerobics either, but you learn something new every day.)

He says 30 percent of the city’s workforce is obese and that he wants to bring in Weight Watchers to hold meetings for city employees in hopes of reducing health care costs. (“I am definitely chunky right now so I’m not pointing any fingers,” he said.)

Dufty said he got these ideas through answering complaints for five years in the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Services. We have a hard time believing people called in to complain that the 14-Mission’s lighting is not purple enough, but Dufty said he likes to think of creative solutions.
And he doesn’t care if people think he’s crazy.

“I’ve felt the inspiration just to not be fettered by fear around how other candidates are doing,” he said. “That’s the great thing about having a juggernaut liked (Ed) Lee in the race. There’s no reason to play it safe. Just be yourself.”

P.S. Dufty gave us a sneak peek of his new ad coming out this week. He recruited scores of Sidney’s friends and former pre-school classmates and shows them wheeling suitcases out of school, through a park and down the street. They’re supposed to represent the 5,000 kids who’ve left San Francisco over the past decade, and the final image shows a family wheeling suitcases across the Golden Gate Bridge.